


hopefully there is a future and we are both allowed in it

by goodbyechunkylemonmilk



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/F, Internalized Homophobia, POV Second Person, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-06
Updated: 2017-04-06
Packaged: 2018-10-14 16:20:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10540104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodbyechunkylemonmilk/pseuds/goodbyechunkylemonmilk
Summary: There’s a side of Ronan only you get to see, the little bit of her that didn’t die with her father. She isn’t sweet with you, not by any means, but if you get her alone in the right mood, she’s the smallest bit less combative, lets her lips get a little closer to a smile than a smirk. You’ve always wanted to feel special, and maybe that’s part of what draws you to Ronan, the feeling of having won something by being with her, by being able to be with her. When Ava asked how you could stand her, you said you liked her honesty. You didn’t mention your ego, but you felt pretty sure Ava knew, and you didn’t say you were in love with her, but the pitying way Ava looked at you made you think she knew that too.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Wendy Xu's "This Year I Mean to Be an Elephant"

It shouldn’t be a surprise, not to you, living as you are on borrowed time. You’ve always been painfully aware of your own mortality, and of course Ronan has been balanced on the knife-edge of disaster almost as long as you’ve known her. But there’s something about seeing her, still and bled-out in a hospital bed, that hammers the point home like nothing else could. You try to wait until it doesn’t feel quite so insensitive—you have shockingly little patience for someone willing to commit years to what most would consider a flight of fancy at best, a psychotic break at worst.  You make it barely a week and a half before you turn to her as she chews determinedly on one of her leather cuffs, rescued from the bottom of a bargain bin at an outlet store, and say, “Life is short.”

You mean this to be, if not exactly celebratory, at least triumphant, but you must not manage to shake the mournfulness that has haunted you since Noa found Ronan in a bloody heap, because her eyebrows jump and she spits out the hide in her mouth to say, disgusted, “ _God.”_ She picks up her Latin book, the only textbook she hasn’t abandoned in your locker and which has accordingly lost both covers and the first fifty pages, and makes to stomp into her room. “How many more times do we have to _do_ this? I said I’m sorry, okay?” This is, in fact, the first time those words have passed her lips, possibly ever, but pointing that out doesn’t seem like a winning proposition.

“That’s not what I meant,” you say, and she slumps back down, eying you warily. You sit in silence while she stares at you, lips set in a pout she likely thinks is intimidating but which, combined with the just-hatched fuzz of her shorn head, makes her look frighteningly vulnerable. “I meant that life is short, and if things…go wrong, I don’t want to have wasted time worrying about what people think.”

“You, worried about what people think? Perish the thought!” Ronan presses a hand to her forehead and swoons right off the couch. The steel toes of her boots come perilously close to your chin before landing with a thump in your lap. She can’t be comfortable—there’s no torso-sized patch of your floor free of things that rightly should have made it to the trash—but she doesn’t show it, just smirks up at you. You bite your lip and she bites hers, contorting her face pointedly as if to mimic your own. “Are you going to say something? Because sorry to ruin the moment, but I’ve got to take a piss.”

It would be very easy to shrug, to say never mind, that you’re just being weird, and Ronan would shove you on the way to the bathroom and never bring it up again. You focus on the soles of her boots, so beat-up you can see the dingy grey of a sock, and you say, not as clearly as you would like, “Do you want to go out with me sometime?”

Ronan whips her feet off of your lap and sits up. The tab of a soda can comes unstuck from between her shoulder blades and falls to the floor with a quiet click. “We go out all the time,” she says, slow, like each word takes something out of her, eyes trained on your left kneecap.

“On a date, I mean.” Asking Ronan not to be difficult has never gotten you anywhere before, so you don’t bother now.

“The great and respectable scion of the Gansey family can’t be _gay **.**_ ” Ronan always knows just how to land her punches, and you flinch just like you’re meant to. If you tell your parents the truth, they won’t be upset, or at least they won’t admit it. They’ll say they love you, in that slightly anemic way they have, and once you’re out of earshot, your father will phone his advisor and ask how having a gay daughter will affect his polling numbers.    

“Well,” you say, and hope you sound more rebellious than you feel, “tough shit. Look, if you don’t want to, that’s fine. We’ll just figure out what we have to do to get back to normal, and I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable. But you do have to say that, because right now you’re just being cruel, and that’s not fair.”

“ _Life_ isn’t fair,” Ronan says, and you feel the truth of it as much as someone who’s led an arguably charmed existence can. She rolls her shoulders back, cracks her neck like she’s bracing for something, and you’ve already accepted the rejection so that when she says, “Yes, let’s go out,” your response comes late enough that she winces. “Unless you’ve already changed your mind.”

You laugh, giddy with success like you haven’t been since the first week of your summer with Malory, find after find, the earth unfolding her secrets just for you. “Of course I haven’t. We should go on a date now. Unless. Should I make reservations somewhere?” You look at the flakes of mud left in your lap by Ronan’s boots, at the bruise decorating her jawbone, and say, with your talent for saying exactly the wrong thing only when it counts, “No, probably not.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I’m not good enough to go somewhere nice?”

“That’s not what I meant,” you say, though it is, a bit. Not that she isn’t _good_ enough, exactly, but simply that she doesn’t fit. Now that she’s said yes, your head aches with the thought at her at dinner with your family, or, worse, at one of your father’s fundraising parties. “I didn’t think you’d want to, but we can. I’ll steal one of the tanks Adam wears at the garage for myself, and we’ll scandalize everyone.” This is a bit cruel; Adam would hate to hear anything of hers described as unfit for high society, and it is likely the bite of your words, not the reassurance, that makes Ronan smile at you again.

 

 

The first time Kavinsky called Ronan a dyke in front of you, half of you was gearing up to lecture her on how inappropriate that was, and the other half was bracing to hold Ronan back, and all of you was much, much too late to stop Ronan from yanking out a handful of her hair, breaking her nose, and bruising three of her ribs. When you and Ava pulled Ronan away, she looked like a scared animal, and Kavinsky said, “Oh, were you keeping that a secret from Gansey here?” Ronan broke free again, less like she wanted to continue the assault and more like she couldn’t stand to be touched by you.

You asked, later, if Kavinsky was right, and Ronan deflected, made crude comment after crude comment until you told her that anyone would take all that posturing as a yes she just couldn’t spit out. She stormed off, because Ronan has a much more limited bag of tricks than she’d like to think. Less than a minute later, she stormed back in and said, arms crossed against her chest, “Fine, yes, are you happy now, Dr. Phil?” You hugged her and refused to let go until she hit you in the gut, because you had to make up for pushing somehow. You’d desperately needed to hear someone say it, even if it meant goading her into admitting something before she was ready.

The second time Kavinsky called Ronan a dyke in front of you, you punched her, and almost broke your thumb tucking it inside your fist. Ronan laughed at you, but for days after, if you turned to look quickly enough, you could catch her smiling, soft and bright-eyed.

 

 

 

 

 

Dating Ronan isn’t any less stressful than being her best friend, but with the added complication of arriving late and disheveled to class because she has a slacker’s knowledge of unpopulated stairwells in which to corner you. It’s fine for now, but your father won’t be content to be a Congressman forever, and then you will have to explain these absences, the slipping of your grades, Ronan’s hand on the small of your back if you’re sloppy enough to be caught.

She was fine with the secrecy at first; between her father’s death and the scars on her wrists, she’s a walking billboard of vulnerabilities, and she saw no reason to add another. But companionship doesn’t come naturally to you, and every time you flinch away, she gets a little twitchier, a little more distant.

You go home without her, to fulfill one of your scheduled familial obligations, and it’s dry and boring and when you come back, she won’t speak to you. You haul your bag up to the second floor, heavy with the equipment you always carry in case you stumble across an unexpected lead, to find Noa sitting alone in the main room. Ronan would never stoop to greeting you, but normally if you’re away for more than twelve hours, she plants herself on the couch so that she can see you without having to admit to actually caring about you. Noa rolls her eyes and says in a highly-audible whisper, “She’s _mad_.” With perfect theatrical timing, something hits the wall in Ronan’s room and lands on the floor with a crash.

It will be worse if you wait, but you’ve been driving for hours because you couldn’t take a fourth night in the etiquette-obsessed mausoleum of your family home, and maybe you wanted to see her, maybe you were actually going to say you _missed_ her, and now you’ve come home to a tropical storm level tantrum.

“I think it hurt her feelings that you didn’t invite her,” Noa says. Inside her room, Ronan throws something else.

“Well, she could have _said_ something.” Noa looks at you. “Right. Fine.” You slump onto the couch and promise yourself that in no more than twenty minutes, you’re going to knock on Ronan’s door. You set the timer on your phone and everything. But with three minutes and forty-seven seconds left, she slams out of her room and is halfway down the stairs before you can process what’s happening.

By the time you catch up, Ronan’s already in the front seat of her BMW, seatbelt trapped uselessly behind her. “Are you mad at me because I didn’t invite you to meet my parents?”

She jams her key in the ignition and revs the engine, staring straight through the windshield with a focus she never shows on the road. “Can I just _be_ in a bad mood? Is that okay? Or do I need your permission to have a life that doesn’t totally revolve around you?”

“You’re always in a bad mood,” you say, and your voice barely shakes at all. “But the timing suggests that this _is_ about me.”

“If you were going to be embarrassed about dating me,” Ronan starts, and falters, and fakes a cough in a poor attempt to cover it. “If I’m _so fucking terrible_ , you shouldn’t have said anything in the first place.” She peels out at what is, even for her, a terrifying pace, and though you aren’t particularly religious, you spend the hours she’s gone praying, bargaining, listing off everything you’d give up just to make this not be the end.

Ronan screeches back into the lot past four in the morning, just when you’re starting to think you’ll have to call the police, or worse, Devin. She leaves the car running and smirks down at you where you’re half-asleep on the ground. “Shouldn’t you be in bed? You have school in the morning.” You watch a split in her lip tug open as she speaks.

You’d meant to apologize, planned out how you’d explain the restrictiveness of your parents’ world, but the smug look on her battered face makes something flare inside you. You get to your feet and lean in close enough that you can see that her wrist is swollen and her tank top stained with still-wet blood. “Go fuck yourself.”

Ronan raises an eyebrow. “Wow, shocking language from a high-society girl.”

You take a breath, and then another when the first doesn’t work. “If I had known you wanted to come, I would have invited you. I’m not— I’m not _hiding_ you. In fact, it’s a little more familial interaction than I’d prefer, but we can go back right now if that’ll make you stop this _bullshit_ , okay, I’ll call and have them make up my room again. I’m sorry you were upset, but you can’t just run off without talking. I was worried you were dead.”

“And how the fuck is that my problem?”

“Because I’m in love with you, you asshole!” Ronan shuts the car off, finally, and the ensuing silence makes her slack-jawed stare even worse. You sway, faint with the humiliation of it. “Oh God. Please, let’s just forget I said that. I don’t expect you to say it back or anything, I’m just—”

Ronan opens the door so fast you have to take a step back. She gets out of the car without breaking eye contact with you, almost tripping in stark contrast to her usual coiled grace. “You knew what you were getting into,” she says, one hand on your waist as she draws you in. You nod. “You knew when you asked. This isn’t easy for me.”

“You’re not making it easy for me either.”

“Then I’m just keeping things fair,” she says, and kisses you. It isn’t enough, not even close, but you let yourself sag into her arms, decide for once to let things lie.

 

For the next two weeks, Ronan is as close to kind as she’s been since she found her father’s corpse beaten and bloodied on her front steps. If she sees Kavinsky in the halls, she walks the other way. When Ava shows up having missed a grease spot after a shift at the garage, Ronan makes eye contact with her and rubs a thumb across the corresponding spot on her own neck, and only makes three rude comments when she comes back from the bathroom red-faced and freshly-scrubbed. She still doesn’t attend most of her classes, but she rides to school with you in the Pig, a tacit agreement that she will at least remain on Aglionby grounds through the school day.

You aren’t stupid, and there is the feeling of a shoe about to drop, but in the soft, gauzy minutes right before you fall asleep, you entertain the idea that this has been a turning point, that all she needed was someone to care for her.

After exactly fourteen days of peace, Ronan hotwires Kavinsky’s white Mitsubishi using a device that seems somehow otherworldly, does two laps of the parking lot at breakneck speed, and then slams it back into its original spot while half the school watches.

You talk her way out of trouble in the headmaster’s office with her sitting next to you and sneering like none of it matters to her, not her future or the effort you’ve put into maintaining it. If you tell her to walk home, you’ll likely be bailing her out by the end of the night, so you let her into the Pig and drive in white-knuckled silence.

At Monmouth, she bursts out of the car like a captive set free. You expect to see her bedroom door slammed shut when you make it up after her, but instead she’s sitting on your bare mattress, one bracelet between her teeth, watching you.

Tired of being the one to reach out, you wait, hoping it will frustrate her, but she just smirks back at you, like she’s accomplished something other than adding another black mark to her already-stained record.

You break first.

“What is _wrong_ with you? You could have been expelled! If you don’t care about yourself, can you at least _try_ to care about me? I don’t understand what else I’m supposed to do.” You haven’t cried since you were saved as a child, not once, not even when you were trapped in an Aglionby restroom for an hour convinced the sound of the faucet running was the hornets come back for you. Now your voice breaks and your eyes fill and you stare at the ceiling, one hand on your sternum, until you can get yourself under control.

Ronan hands you the toilet paper from the bathroom, which neither of you will remember to put back before someone needs it. When you look, she’s watching you like you’re an animal that’s just performed a fascinating but rather disgusting trick, like a monkey juggling its own feces. She lets the leather cord fall from her mouth and swallows hard. “You can’t just jerk me around. You wanted this, you wanted me, so you’ve _got_ me. I could be decent to your parents if you gave me a chance, but I’m not going to be a different person for you. If you wanted a prim little social-climber you could have asked Ava. She’d do it, I’m sure; you just haven’t found the right price yet.”

“Ronan—”

“I’m not stupid, Gansey.”

“I never said that.” If she wanted, you know, she could give Ava a run for her money, and you suspect she keeps her Latin grade up only to make sure Ava knows this as well.

“I wish I were.” Ronan picks up a rock someone’s stowed in an abandoned takeout container, tosses and catches it a few times and then, without warning, throws it with an admirable bit of force out the open window. You listen for the sound of glass breaking, but it doesn’t seem to have hit either of your cars, though whether that’s by luck or design you aren’t sure. “Then this would work. I want this to work. It’s been nice, hasn’t it?” You nod, and she mimics the gesture with a sort of savage satisfaction. “Right. It has been. But you’re ashamed of me. And if I were stupid maybe I wouldn’t know, and things could keep being nice, but I’m not stupid, so I do know.”

“I already said you could come home with me when I go for Helen’s birthday!”

“Of course you did. You can’t help it. You see a problem and you want to fix it, which is probably what this whole thing’s about in the first place. I was mad at you, so you gave me what you thought I wanted. But you _are_ embarrassed. I don’t care whether you tell them we’re dating. I don’t even know if I want—” She stops, bites thoughtfully on her bracelet for a moment, and starts again. “Well, I understand not being ready for that, I mean. But I care that you won’t even— You’ve been telling Ava for ages that you’d like her to meet some of your parents’ friends, but we’ve been together for months and you didn’t even say anything before you left. You’re not being _fair_.”

“I don’t want to disappoint my parents. They think of me a certain way, and it’s just easiest for all of us if they keep pretending and I keep letting them.”

“Well, I’m sorry that being associated with me makes you a _disappointment_.” Ronan acts tough, but the truth is that everyone knows what’s happened to her, which means her only option is to be so terribly, visibly damaged that she hurts to look at, like the blinding force of a solar eclipse. It works on everyone but you, for the same reason you’ll be the one to find Glendower: you like to pick at things, to understand their inner workings. Ronan acts tough, but all she has going for her is an adamant refusal to let people see her, and now that you’ve forced your way in, you can’t just throw up your hands because you’re tired of the responsibility.

“That’s not what I’m saying. Ronan, I like who I am with you. All your shit aside—which we are going to talk about later, by the way— I really, honestly like the version of myself I am around you. I’ve never had trouble fitting in, but you don’t make it easy, and I _like_ that. I’m just scared my parents won’t.” You take a breath, smoothing your hands against the off-center pleats of your khakis. “I just don’t want to let anyone down.”

“And does it matter at all that you’re letting me down?” She looks as small as you’ve ever seen her, and the fact that it’s a genuine question hurts more than you’d thought it would.

“Of course it does. God, Ronan, of course it does. This isn’t so easy for me either. But I’m not giving up on you, and I’m not letting you give up on me. Okay?” You only have trouble reading Ronan when even she doesn’t know what she’s going to do, which is much more often than you’d like. You watch, suppressing the urge to vomit right there in the doorway where you’re still standing, and she looks everywhere but into your eyes. When you can’t take it anymore, you repeat, “Okay?”

Ronan makes a point of inspecting her nails as if they aren’t bitten ragged and dirty as always. “Okay,” she says, impossibly soft before she recovers and rolls her eyes. “I guess I’m in too deep to just walk off now anyway.” Which is, for her, exceedingly romantic, even if she makes it sound like you’ve torn it out of her by shoving bamboo under her fingernails.


End file.
